Baby Boomers: Discontinuing Damaging Family Legacies. upbringing and the traditional portrait of the 1950 s family. According to sociologist Robert

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1 Wilm 1 Baby Boomers: Discontinuing Damaging Family Legacies Many members of the Baby Boom generation maintain a certain nostalgia for their upbringing and the traditional portrait of the 1950 s family. According to sociologist Robert Bellah, this generation even envied their parents for the family created by 1950 s ideals. At the same time, Bellah argues that Baby Boomers resisted following the same path as their parents and wanted to be nothing like them. Such a dichotomous regard for parents of the Baby Boom generation shows the traditional 1950 s family ideals coveted by Baby Boomers as well as the difficult realities of trying to create the perfect 1950 s household. Using a portrait of the ideal traditional family in the 1950 s sitcom Father Knows Best and contrasting it with the realities in To Have and to Hold by Jessica Weiss, this dichotomy becomes especially clear. Baby Boomers hold fast to the admiration of their parents idealized family support system, but strive against the barriers created by the gender roles present in that system. Ultimately, Baby Boomer adults call an end to gendered familial and marital legacies that had created hardships for their own fathers and mothers. One of the main attractions to the 1950 s family ideal is the perceived support provided by marital and parental gender roles. The organization of a family with the father as the breadwinner and the mother as homemaker appears to be a flawless system of maintaining family harmony in sitcoms like Father Knows Best. Viewers see the content mother and wife, Mrs. Anderson, cooking breakfast for her family, kissing her husband goodbye as he leaves for work, and comforting discouraged children. Actual young mothers of the 1950 s similarly spent the majority of their day completing domestic duties while caring for two to three tots in diapers at the same time (Weiss 38). After all, 1950 s ideology insisted that women would find fulfillment in child raising and home care (Weiss 38). The father, represented by Mr. Anderson,

2 Wilm 2 financially supports his wife and children with his job outside the home. Just like Mr. Anderson, the 1950 s father occupied the role as breadwinner and financially supported his wife and growing family. With the homemaking mother and breadwinner father working together, the ideal 1950 s family created organization and efficiency with a gendered division of labor. For this reason, the traditional 1950 s family appealed to Baby Boomers by demonstrating a supportive family network driven by gendered marital and parental roles. These roles appear to effectively organize, support and maintain the family unit to create a harmonious family and marriage. Yet Baby Boomers wanted to be nothing like their parents. Despite the perceived support and organization of the traditional family, Baby Boomers recognized the many downfalls of pursuing these unattainable 1950 s family ideals. Looking first on the effects on the father, the pressures of the traditional breadwinning role and the commitment to financially supporting the family isolated the patriarch from his children. For the majority of 1950 s families, most if not all of the financial responsibility rested on the husband s shoulders. Breadwinning was almost exclusively assigned to males. These men often found the prospect of supporting an entire household frightening as they entered marriage and especially as they entered parenthood. Because many couples married young, men found a hasty transition from financial dependence on their own parents to their new status as the family breadwinner (Weiss 33). The emotional pressure of such a large responsibility caused many men to interpret financial straits as the result of personal inadequacies (Weiss 37). As a result, young men spent long hours in the office, away from family life, to feel adequate in their support of kin. In doing so, fathers had little time to play with and care for children. As these men entered retirement with the desire to reconnect with grown children, their previously distant role as father continued to isolate the father from his children (Weiss ). Consequently, from early fatherhood until the time of

3 Wilm 3 retirement, the prescribed male gender role of breadwinner placed heavy financial responsibility on the working father. Paired with a worry of inadequacy, fathers immersed themselves into the office and away from home to provide a steady income for their families. While the father s job represented a strong commitment to support children and family, the father s breadwinner role ultimately served to isolate him from the family he worked so diligently to support. Sitcoms like Father Knows Best may depict the role of the breadwinner as an enviable and admirable ideal for the well-oiled machine of the 1950 s family, but Baby Boomers recognized that such an ideal created family tension and isolation. As the sons and daughters to these fathers, Baby Boomers lived the tensions first-hand. In fact, Baby Boomers surveyed in 1970 noted their fathers excess involvement in work and the overall unhappiness that resulted (Weiss 103). This trend, however, was nothing new. Fathers of Baby Boomers cited similar emotional costs to breadwinning displayed by their own fathers, where one survey respondent explained, I m perpetrating the same crimes as I used to accuse my father of [ ] (qtd. in Weiss 104). While Baby Boomer sons may have envied the ideal of the male breadwinner financially supporting the family, these sons desired to stop the legacy of a father-child isolation created by a father s commitment to work. Just as the pursuit of the breadwinner ideal isolated men from their families, the quest for the perfect homemaker role isolated wives and mothers from personal and social cultivation outside the home s values insisted women belonged in the home to care for children and household tasks. Many husbands in particular upheld these values and did not always welcome their wives desire to join the workforce. In fact, a wife in the workforce indicated fault in the husband s role as the breadwinner and questioned patriarchal power to financially provide for the family (Weiss 74). Without the social contacts provided through a work environment, mothers did not attain the social community of the workplace that combatted the loneliness of the

4 Wilm 4 suburban middle-class home (Weiss 70). If a wife did enter the workforce, her job was accepted only if her wages were clearly supplemental to her husbands (Weiss 74). Even in this situation, the 1950 s woman felt pressure to maintain a serene atmosphere at home and therefore had to prioritize her domestic duties over her job status (qtd. in Weiss 66). In the end, her confinement to the home and her devotion to the care of others took its toll on [a homemaker] in loss of self-esteem (Weiss 72). With pressure to conform to the gendered ideal of the homemaker role and its confinement within the home, 1950 s mother found social isolation and a lack of self-fulfillment in her childrearing and household duties. For Baby Boomers, the domestic ideal of the female homemaker appeared to be an essential element to the harmonious functioning of the 1950 s family by providing necessary childcare and household support. Mrs. Anderson seemed perfectly content in her domestic domain after all. However, Baby Boomers also understood the restrictive force of the role. Baby Boomers observed that when wives and mothers did enter the workforce, these women found personal fulfillment and a sense of accomplishment in their newfound capabilities (Weiss 72-73). They also left behind the social isolation of the home in favor of social interaction and community in the workplace (Weiss 70). Furthermore, a working woman no longer depended entirely on her husband s earnings. In the case of divorce, a wife s own funds allowed her the freedom to escape the oppressive home and survive on her own. In this case, she would not have to endure a troubled marriage simply to have a place to live (Weiss 72). As a result, mothers commitment to domesticity and their denial of their own discontent were ambiguous legacies to Baby Boomer daughters (qtd. in Weiss 6). These daughters desired to reverse these legacies. They rejected the isolation of a full-time homemaker in search of the freedom and fulfillment offered by the workplace.

5 Wilm 5 While the traditional roles of breadwinner and homemaker confined the husband and wife in separate realms of isolation, their gendered responsibilities also isolated the two partners in their marriage. As Weiss explains, The differing demands of mothering and fathering, and the manner in which the parents of the baby boom divided their roles, made companionship almost nonexistent in the childbearing years. Couples shared joint long-term goals but not daily experiences ( ). The couple s commitment to raising children combined with the separate spheres of the gendered breadwinner-homemaker roles hindered empathetic communication between the partners. The breadwinner could not identify with the daily struggles of childcare and housework, while the homemaker did not relate to the stresses of work life. The couple understood each partner s role served to support the couple s children for the long-term, but each partner did not experience the same day-to-day experience of providing that support. Even as children left the home and the couple s responsibilities to children lessened, marital companionship remained elusive (Weiss 129). In fact, after spending so many years devoted to children, many couples found that the purpose of their marriage had disappeared upon the arrival of the empty nest. If the gender roles of the marriage emphasized children in this way, divorce could likely be the result for many couples (Weiss 190). In effect, the sharp divides between the work experience of the father and the household duties of the mother followed the gendered division of labor touted by the 1950 s ideal family. However, it ultimately isolated the partners and threatened their marriage. To the Baby Boomers witnessing a disintegration of their parents union, marital discord added a final family legacy that the Baby Boomer generation was determined to stop.

6 Wilm 6 Media images of 1950 s families like the Andersons in Father Knows Best foster the Baby Boomer s envy of their parents. Idealizing a seemingly effective system of gender role division of labor, Baby Boomers held a skewed nostalgia for the harmonious family life of the 1950 s. Despite this envied ideal, the Baby Boomers did recognize the harm created by attempts to achieve this 1950 s family portrait. As seen through the father s isolation from the family because of his breadwinning burdens and the mother s social isolation from her domestic duties in the confines of the home, traditional gender roles did not create harmonious families. These ideals placed particular strain on the very foundation of family life the marriage. Considering these downfalls of their parents paths in childrearing and marriage, Baby Boomers wanted to be nothing like their parents. Baby Boomers desired to stop the gendered role assumptions inherited from multiple generations past and pave their own way for a fulfilling life in marriage and childrearing. The legacy of harmful family ideals needed to end. Nevertheless, Weiss cites a longevity of traditional norms that may prove hard to break (Weiss 120). Legacies endure across generations. Yet parents of the Baby Boom began the discontinuation of the legacy as they started to raise questions on the effectiveness of their lifestyles. They began to venture outside their assigned roles as women entered the work place and fathers took on more responsibility in the home. Parents did desire to change the gendered legacy of their own lives and they therefore encouraged more egalitarian values for their Baby Boomer children. As these children matured to adulthood, a trend towards egalitarian values was one family legacy Baby Boomers did want to uphold.